The newly established Paul Ramsey Foundation is in the frame of the hard left — Keith Windschuttle, Quadrant

Still don’t believe that our universities have been taken over by the hard, hard, hard, Marxist left who are out to trash Western civilisation? With the announcement of the creation of the Paul Ramsey Foundation a month or so ago, charged with the promotion and teaching of Western Civilisation, I wondered just how long it would take before it was infected, infested and captured by the hard left. Guess what? It’s about to happen.

“….As an alumnus of the University of Sydney, last month I received an e-mail newsletter announcing the appointment of a new Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Looking at the front-page photograph of the dean standing next to a bicycle, hands in trouser pockets, I couldn’t tell whether this was a man or a woman. When I read the accompanying text, I found this was intended. Here is the newsletter’s description of the new dean’s qualifications:

Annamarie Jagose is internationally known as a scholar in feminist studies, lesbian/gay studies and queer theory. She is the author of four monographs, most recently Orgasmology, which takes orgasm as its scholarly object in order to think queerly about questions of politics and pleasure; practice and subjectivity; agency and ethics.

Professor Jagose was formerly a member of the Department of English with Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne and is the former editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. She lists her research interests as “queer theory, feminist theory, cultural studies and everyday life”. She has received recent research grants for projects such as “The individual, the couple, the society: Rethinking relationality in queer social theory” and “Real sex in the cinema: revisiting indexicality, realism and temporality.

If the Paul Ramsay Foundation funds the University of Sydney to run its Western civilisation program, Professor Jagose is one of the key personnel who will appoint lecturers to teach it and decide how it will be administered and assessed. The foundation should also note that her speciality, queer theory, has no connection whatsoever to any traditional Western academic discipline. It is a recently concocted ideology from identity politics….”